


pretend you don't have one

by TheTartWitch



Series: One-shots of AUs [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bullying, Dumbledore defeats Voldemort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Severus POV, Vomiting Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 20:38:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8592676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: "Best way to not get your heart broken, is pretend you don't have one." - Charlie Sheen. (His is a deception lasting decades. His is a mask that he sleeps in, that he sneers with, that he will die in. His is a facade worthy of an award, because never once does it crack.But still.It is but an act.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Some Severus feels for you. Here you go.  
> This all started when I began reading 'SNAPE: A Definitive Reading' by Lorrie Kim, which does a fantastic job of painting Snape as a human being and going deep into his character and also making me really sad for him, so I wrote this and now it's way longer than my other one-shots.

His is a deception lasting decades. His is a mask that he sleeps in, that he sneers with, that he will die in. His is a facade worthy of an award, because never once does it crack.

But still.

It is but an act.

\--

Lily is his first friend. They bond over plants and potions and their mutual attraction to boys. Lily is the first ever who doesn’t laugh at the way he blushes when speaking of potions he wants to try, or call him names when he shows her a new book. 

It’s too good to last; everything worth it is.

Lily grows up pretty and whip-smart. She dismantles Hogwarts by being clever without condescension, sarcastic without derision, and she attracts attention without seeking it. James Potter’s attention.

At first they hate each other. She is everything he is not, and vice versa. Severus grows to appreciate the way her eyes flash when speaking of her latest nemesis. 

This is when he stops smiling in the halls, but it’s not because of  _ her _ .

\--

They attend Slughorn’s balls together as dates, snickering when people act like they expect them to kiss. Severus’ laugh gets quieter and quieter as the days go on; she doesn’t notice. The fire of competition has consumed her, leaving ashes for Severus to sift his fingers though. 

James Potter’s methods of torture are efficient and shocking, and Severus dreams at night of hanging upside down in empty corridors and filled courtyards ringing with laughter. He grows to hate the sound of laughter.

No. 

He grows to  _ fear  _ it. 

\--

None of the teachers assist him. Dumbledore’s eyes twinkle as he walks calmly past the corner where Severus has been frozen for hours and illusioned to look like a statue. He’s exhausted himself fighting the strain of Potter’s magic, and everyone’s realized by now that Lily’s not coming to help except Lily herself. Footsteps approach well into midnight and his body slumps at the sudden relaxation of his muscles. He lays there, unwilling and unable to move, until Filch comes along and sees him there. He gets points taken from his House and a detention in the woods with, luck of all lucks, the Quartet of Doom. Black sneers at him from behind the groundskeeper’s back, and Severus hides his shudder with a distaining sniff. Lupin’s eyes are wide, and he’s watching Severus like the smaller boy is going to explode. 

“What’re you in detention for?” asks Lydian, a third-year Ravenclaw whom Severus knows in passing. 

“Getting caught outside my dormitory after curfew.” He replies, and thinks there’s some sort of gasp behind him, but it’s probably just Pettigrew tripping on a root or something.

\--

He’s in fourth year when Black runs up to him in the corridor with panic all over his face, pointing to the courtyard.

“ _ Lily _ ,” he gasps, and Severus is off like a shot, dragging Black behind him. 

“Where.” He demands, and Black shows him the tunnel under the Whomping Willow.

\--

Lily is nowhere to be found, and he’s scrabbling for his life, breath coming thick and choppy in his chest. 

( _ “Be careful, dear,” says Madam Pomfrey, “a condition like this could easily get worse under stress, so be careful not to get too worked up, alright?”  _

_ Severus smiles at her. _

_ He doesn’t promise, and she doesn’t notice. _ )

The wolf is behind him, sniffing at the entrance to the tunnel, and as it gets closer and closer he is screaming and begging Black to let him out, to help him,  _ please _ , but he doesn’t really expect the boy to do it. Black and Potter and Lupin and Pettigrew would probably be delighted to see him gone in a permanent fashion. 

He wonders whether Tobias would notice his absence.

The opening to the tunnel peels back above him, and Potter’s face, white with tension and pinching around the edges of his eyes, appears. He instantly lowers an arm and Severus grabs it, almost crying with fear. Potter pulls him up and slams the opening shut again. Severus slumps in the corner, as far from them as physically possible. He can’t breathe, can’t focus on anything at all. His vision is whiting out around the edges.

Black is laughing in the background, as though he’s just heard the punchline of an excellent joke, and Severus realizes Lily was never in any danger at all. Black would never laugh like that if she was, especially not in front of Potter.

He cringes away from the hand Potter offers to help him up and runs as far as he can before vomiting and then crawling to the Slytherin dungeons.

\--

He doesn’t tell a soul what’s happened to him the next morning at breakfast; not why there’s dirt dried and crusting under his nails, not why his voice is hoarse, not why his face is as pale as their parchments. ( _ Lupin’s is equally pale, for some reason. _ )

He’s so quiet, he can clearly hear the plan of the older purebloods discussing mudbloods and a certain  _ You-Know-Who  _ (they glance around like guilty thieves as they say it) who’s going to take what’s theirs and give it back to the purebloods. He butters his toast and thinks,  _ Lily is a muggleborn. _

\--

He calls her a mudblood in public, and even as he says it his eyes widen, because he can’t believe he’s doing this, can’t believe he’s doing this to  _ Lily _ , his only friend. 

As she stalks away, followed closely by a glaring Quartet, someone pats him on the back.

“ _ Good job _ ,” they whisper.

He swallows the lump in his throat and forces a smile.

\--

The Quartet becomes vicious. 

He doesn’t fight what he deserves.

\--

Voldemort targets the Potters, years later. Severus heard Lily had married Potter, and that they’d had a son; he’d debated for a moment, jokingly, if he should send a note of congratulations. He sends one now, though.

_ Pettigrew is Voldemort’s _ , his Patronus tells Lily in the form of glowing doe. 

( _ He knows what he’s given up by sending that, but the alternative is her death. His pride will always rank below her life in importance to him. _ )

They change the Secret-keeper to Black and live. He cries tears of relief that night, but he doesn’t go to visit. He’s not  _ that  _ stupid.

\--

Dumbledore destroys Voldemort soon after that, leaving Severus to accept a position teaching Potions to ignorant firsties. He remembers when he was one; he sees none of his determination and joy in his new students. A few of them stare at his forearm in judgment. 

He doesn’t call them out for it. They have every right.

\--

At one of Slughorn’s disgusting parties, someone put a hex on Severus’ cup, so that later that night he was admitted to the hospital wing due to vomiting blood in the halls afterwards. Pettigrew is there, getting treatment for a papercut he tried to heal and instead made worse, but Severus doesn’t know it until the next morning, when Pettigrew smirks at him all through breakfast and makes gagging sounds and motions. 

Severus turns away before he can look at the rest of them, trying not to remember the way his throat had felt bitter and dry and how his lungs had spent the night seizing in his ribcage, how Madam Pomfrey had tried to hide her floo-call with a doctor at St. Mungo’s because the spell cast had been  _ wrong _ and she didn’t want to mess it up any further with magic when she didn’t know the potential side effects. How, three times, his body had seized on the bed, his magic trying to draw in the very air it was denying him, merely adding to his distress.

He tells Madam Pomfrey it was a potions experiment, and gets a lecture on not practicing potentially dangerous magic without telling an adult first or setting up precautions. What if he’d been unable to make it to the hospital wing? 

( _ He could have sworn someone had helped him, murmuring quiet apologies every time he wheezed past the acrid taste or had to dry-heave or he’d choke. _ )

The pranks had died down a bit after that, probably since he’d started visiting St. Mungo’s for his apprenticeship-slash-treatment, but they soon returned with a vengeance. He barely noticed the lull.

\--

When the final battle against Voldemort is over he tugs his mask off and limps to a chair in the corner of the hall. It’s bare wood and has a stiff, pointy back, but he falls asleep right there. He doesn’t care if they arrest him; he hasn’t slept in days, worried about his mentally-decaying ‘master’ discovering all the thoughts he kept chained in the back of his head if he dozed off. 

He wakes to a pained shriek and jerks awake, instantly conscious. Bellatrix Lestrange’s preferred method of waking sleeping comrades had always been some sort of torture spell, meant to ‘keep them on their toes’. He’s been prepared for this since he joined up.

It’s Lily, her eyes glassy and her mouth open. Behind her are the remaining three of the Quartet: James Potter, Sirius Black, and Remus Lupin. He realizes he’s standing with his wand unsheathed and slowly sinks back into the chair, muscles aching with the sudden release of tension after having to snap to attention.

He watches them warily as they step into the room, and Lily gets several steps towards him when Potter grabs her arm in warning.

“Lils, he’s still a Death Eater,” he says, voice managing to sound regretful, and Severus’ eyelids begin to droop. He fights them desperately, aware of Black’s hateful presence in the room, and when Lily’s arms wrap around him they jolt open anyway.

“Sev,” she cries into his shoulder, and he pats her back with his good arm. The other hangs at an awkward, limp angle from his shoulder. She pulls back to study him and sees it, gasping. “Sev!” She says again, “Why haven’t you been to a healer for that?”

He shrugs, ignoring the painful tug, and leans his head back to rest on the wall behind him. 

“It’s been like that for a while,” he admits, his voice raspy from lack of use. “I’d actually managed to forget it until you reminded me.”

“When did it occur?” She orders, going into Healer mode and pulling a small bag from her pocket. She unshrinks it and starts to dig through it for supplies.

“Yesterday,” he says, watching her with a small smile. It’s all been worth it; the nights spent in Voldemort’s company, frightened and wary and struggling in the jaws of a fanged menace. She’s alive, and happy, and she smiles back at him with something like genuine feeling. 

“I’m going to have to knock you out, Sev, sorry. When’s the last time you slept and for how long? You’ve got bags the size of Italy!” She exclaims, tilting his chin to get a better look.

He doesn’t remember. Sleep was something you couldn’t afford when you had to choose between sleeping at the side of a Dark Lord or not sleeping at all, and eventually you learned to operate solely on Pepper-Up potions and Rinvigorate!, a sort of coffee-like substance that Bellatrix grew in her greenhouses. 

“Um.” He says, and studies a wall to his left.

She sighs at him and knocks him out.

\--

Harry Potter is five years old when Severus first meets him. He is browsing the aisles of a toy store for a gag gift for the staff’s Christmas party at Hogwarts, staring at a life-size statue of a man in wizarding robes  _ made entirely out of Legos. _ He considers purchasing it just for Albus, but decides against it. He’s stepped on Legos before; they look innocent, but they hurt like a son of a dragon. He moves on to glare at an image of a girl in a mini-skirt and a wand made of heart-shaped bubbles.  _ What the fuck. Am I supposed to be wearing that, as a wizard? _

Something grabs his robes near his hip, startling him so thoroughly that he jumps with a gasp.

It’s a little boy with a head of hair like a black dog’s behind, all shaggy and adorable, and his eyes are as green as an Unforgiveable. Severus knows instantly that a) this is Lily’s son, and b) the boy is alone in a store made for man-children and other children for whom hiding in rafters and women’s bathrooms are wonderful adventures.

“Hi,” says the boy, studying him. Apparently Severus is deemed acceptable, because the little boy immediately shifts to “What do  _ you _ want for Christmas?”

Severus doesn’t  _ do  _ Christmas presents. Besides the staff party, there’s no one he’d give them to or receive them from. He doesn’t tell Harry that the present he sends every year is the only real present he ever buys. 

“Er.” He says intelligently, glancing around for the boy’s father. Instead of answering, he asks, “Harry, are you happy?”

The boy tilts his head. “Yeah, I think so. I’m not  _ unhappy _ .”

“Good,” says Severus, smiling at Lily’s eyes on Potter’s face. “Every year, my present to myself is that you and your mother, Lily, are happy where you are. If at any time that changes, you are welcome to let me know so that I can help you get to a happy place again.”

“...ok, Uncle Sev,” says Harry, blinking at him, and behind them comes Potter’s frantic voice calling for his son. Severus directs the boy in Potter’s direction and heads discretely for the children’s faerie tales section; those always cause laughs at the staff party. One year, there was an entirely serious and drunken conversation on the merits of muggle fiction versus wixen fiction. Minerva had gotten especially involved, and had ended up using the punch ladle to backflip into the punch bowl while in her animagus form.

\--

Once, Black visits Hogwarts for a personal discussion with Dumbledore. 

Severus spends as much of the day as physically possible in Hogsmeade, unwilling to see Black’s snarling face in the place he’s begun to associate with ‘safe’ again. Black is gone by the time he returns the following morning, and Severus congratulates himself for a job well-done.

\--

He can’t hate them, as much as he wishes it were possible. Lily smiles more around James than she ever did around Severus, and Harry doesn’t follow his father’s example to much, so he’s salvageable, but while he may be able to abstain from hatred, there is an undeniable current of loathing beneath his skin in the morning one year, when he is forced to venture to the staff’s table to be seated beside Black, who has accepted the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. 

Every time the man opens his mouth, Severus is reminded of how it laughed at him under the Whomping Willow, of how it lied to him to send him into mortal danger. When he smiles, Severus is taken back to the courtyard Potter and Black loved to hang him upside-down in the air in. Severus wants to lock him away from his students, to protect them, but Black’s apparent sense of honor extends to his students; he wouldn’t hurt them.

The one time Black tries to initiate physical contact between them, extending a hand for a handshake, Severus stares at the hand as though Black has hidden some sort of hex inside it, trying to figure out what painful surprise Black was aiming for now. When Black’s friendly smile falters around the edges, Severus steps cleanly to the side and walks briskly away, ready to set a shield at his back if need be. He wonders at the hurt in the other man’s eyes;  _ what did he think was going to happen? Seven years of defense against the one who now wanted his trust? Instincts were hard to suppress, especially defensive ones. _

\--

Over the years it gets easier for him to accept Black’s presence. They still don’t touch, but by the time Harry attends his first year at Hogwarts, they’re civil enough for impersonal conversations on the weather and such.

Severus finds he has forgiven Black for his actions when they were young, but the leftover flashbacks, shudders away from the other man’s touch, and the chronic magical breathing disorder brought on by the constant stress he’d lived under in school weren’t ever going to really go away. It was hard to forget such things when all he had now was memories.


End file.
